View DTC Instances

Stop and Start DTC

Stop

Stopping DTC will abort all active transactions. So, you will get asked to confirm this action unless you turn off confirmation.

PS> Stop-Dtc -DtcName Local -Confirm:$False

Start

PS> Start-Dtc -DtcName Local

Status

You could use a script to confirm that DTC is started or stopped. When you call Get-Dtc and pass it an instance name it will return a property named “Status”. This property will tell you if the DTC instance is Started or Stopped.

Here we set the name of the instance to set values for then list the property value pairs we want to set. $True/$False are PowerShell parameters that return the boolean values for true or false respectively. If you try to run this set command, you will get a message asking if you want to stop DTC. I tried first stopping DTC then running this command and it still presented the confirmation message. You can add -Confirm:$False to turn off the confirmation message.

Conclusion

There is a lot more you can do, but this fits my automation needs. The only thing I couldn’t figure out is how to set the DTC Logon Account. There maybe a magical way of finding the registry keys and setting them or something, but I couldn’t find anything on it. If you know, please share…I’ll give you a cookie.